


My Dearest

by moonmoth (greyvvardenfell)



Series: Moth & Raven [5]
Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:07:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28232166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greyvvardenfell/pseuds/moonmoth
Summary: While looking through Julian's old notes on the Plague, he and Reyja find an interesting letter.
Relationships: Apprentice/Julian Devorak
Series: Moth & Raven [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1696501
Comments: 3
Kudos: 26





	My Dearest

**Author's Note:**

> I have no excuse for how disgustingly self-indulgent this is.

> _My dearest,_

I freeze, startled by the sheet of paper I just picked up. Julian’s desk is a mess, but we’ve made good progress on it so far. We’re scraping his notes on the Plague together: Nadia offered to have them bound as a record and memorial for the immense amount of work he did in his effort to find the cure. It’s only appropriate, she said, that future generations know how dedicated, how smart he was. I agreed enthusiastically, Julian less so. Even now, he still doesn’t see it.

This page was once part of a journal. I read it again: _my dearest._ That’s what he calls me… But it looks old, and it’s buried in pages from the time before my death.

“What do you have there, darling?” Julian looks up from the other side of the desk, where he'd been puzzling through his own handwriting to see if the stack of notes he just found were worth keeping. “You can add it to this pile if you can’t read it. What was I thinking, writing so sloppily that the ink splashed?”

We both know what he was thinking: _there’s no time, there’s no time, more die for every second I delay._ His mind goes so much faster than his hands ever could, for better and worse. He falls into spirals of doubt just as quickly as he connects facts and figures into coherent research.

“No,” I say slowly. “I can read it.”

He’s at my side in an instant, immediately worried. I can already hear him apologizing for making me help, though he did no such thing. But he’s always so concerned about my potential reaction to the trauma of the Plague, even though I’ve told him I don’t even remember it. It’s just a story to me, with names I know attached to characters I can picture vividly, but any actual memory that might’ve been stirred by the recollection is long gone now.

“I think it’s a letter,” I tell him.

“Hm. I don’t remember writing to anyone back then. I suppose I could’ve been asking Nazali about—”

“It’s addressed to ‘my dearest.’”

Julian pales, shifting his gaze from me to the paper. “May I?”

I hold it out to him.

His eyes flash over the page, and then his jaw drops. Eventually he looks up, back down, up again. “Reyja, I—” He swallows hard. “I think you need to see this.”

Frowning, I move to his side and take the letter from his shaking hand. I didn’t want to upset him. I should’ve read it first, before I said…

> _My dearest,_
> 
> _It's been a month since I last saw you. I wish I would've walked you home, through all that rain and thunder. I wish I would've taken just a moment, just for you, and perhaps everything would have ended differently. I think about you every day. Every hour, it seems. I think of questions to ask you, I look around and wonder where you are and… and it hurts every time._

Is this…?

> _There’s so much I should have said. I wanted to, I swear I did. We would slip out for dinner and I'd almost say it. We'd be filing records at the same time and I'd almost say it. We would meet at the door of a patient's room, me leaving and you about to enter, and damn me, I wanted to take you away and have you all to myself._

We knew each other, worked together…

> _What would you have done, darling, if I'd been so brave? Would you have laughed in my face? Kissed me breathless? Pulled me into my office and had your way with me, damn the consequences? I would've begged you for that, you know._

I don’t believe it…

> _I can't say what it is about you that compels me so. Damn it… compelled. God, but I hate that simple reminder that this is useless, that I missed my chance with you. I'm such a fool. No, worse than that. Fools can be forgiven, with their heads in the clouds. They mean no harm. But I stopped myself every time I wanted you. I knew I was watching the sand in the hourglass dribble away and I kept letting it go. Letting you go._
> 
> _Until you were gone._

I turn to face him. He’s looking at me with tears in his eyes and a love so tangible I could reach out, tuck it into my heart, and never feel unwanted again. He told me, of course, after he returned from the Hanged Man’s realm, that he’d been attracted to me back then, but I assumed it was a passing crush, born mostly of proximity. I figured it was only after we met again, this time, that it became anything more.

I think I might have been wrong.

> _I dream about you and what we could've had. It's such sweet torment to see you so clearly and know that it isn't real. That it never will be._
> 
> _You stirred things in me I didn't realize I had. There were others before you, but I cannot imagine anyone after. How can I look into another's eyes and not search for something that reminds me of you? How could I take someone to bed and not picture my hands on your body instead? How could I pull someone close, feel their breath on my lips, taste them and let them taste me, without longing for such an embrace with you?_
> 
> _You ruined me, Reyja, and oh, but I'm so grateful for it. To have met you, known you… I wish I hadn't been such a coward. When we were but ships in the night, passing without knowing how little time we had, I wish I would've dropped anchor and let the world rush on without us. I don't even have the memory of your touch to revisit when I ache for your presence. You were so close, yet I kept you so far. I will regret that for the rest of my life._

“Julian…”

He surges forward, scooping me into his arms and burying his face in the crook of my neck, folding over me like a cloak. Kisses rain down my shoulder, matched by teardrops. It almost hurts, how tightly he’s hugging me, but I don’t want him to let go.

> _They've called me to the palace. I think I'm in trouble for what I said last week, when they had to hold me back from launching myself at Lucio and his sadist of a medical advisor. I wouldn't have been so brash, but they had the audacity, the **temerity** , to suggest that the deaths of so many are necessary. Thin the herd, they said, and the herd grows stronger. I would've taken offense to that without having lost you, of course, but to hear someone claim that you deserved it… I cannot imagine Quaestor Valdemar and I will ever see eye-to-eye, nor would I want to. Their methods are cruel and unethical, but they've been given full dispensation to carry on. We’re getting desperate now. And while I don't think they and I will be friends, their research has opened some interesting leads mine never did. And never would have, considering what they had to do for that data._
> 
> _I miss you so much. I miss you every day, every moment. I miss you with every beat of my heart. I have no right: I'm too old for you, and far too much trouble. And this whole mess of a Plague… it's what kept us apart, even as it brought us together. I couldn't offer you the devotion you deserved. I couldn't stop, couldn't even slow down. I gave this goddamned empty cure my all, and I had nothing left to give to you. Oh, if I could do it all again…_
> 
> _But I can't. I'll never have another chance. Ha, but I frown at Valdemar's methods while disregarding the impact of my own, don't I?_

I’m crying too. I can feel his heartache in every word, his self-hatred and his hopelessness. If I had known, then, what I was doing to him, would I have stayed? Would I have done as he wondered and thrown myself at him?

Did I love him then as I do now?

> _Perhaps I shouldn't have written all this. Foolish. Pathetic. I'll leave it here, I think, when I go. I can’t let myself be so distracted. I never should’ve gotten distracted in the first place. Perhaps if I hadn’t, if I hadn’t suggested so hopefully that you come work at the clinic, if I’d made you go home after those long shifts so you could rest and keep your strength up, if I hadn’t spent night after night wishing I was a better man instead of pushing myself to figure all this out… I could drown myself in “ifs” and I’d be no closer, to you or a cure._
> 
> _Whatever they want me for, I get the sense it will take awhile. But whether I'm arrested or recruited, this will all be over eventually. I’ll give everything I have left, for the sake of the lives lost in its wake._
> 
> _For your sake, my darling._
> 
> _Yours for every tomorrow,_   
>  _J_

I turn around in his embrace and cry my own tears into his chest. I must have known. I must have been able to feel it. And given what he means to me, I must have loved him too. How cruel would I have been if I hadn't even noticed, if I'd been so wrapped up in my own misery that I couldn't see what he wanted me to see… But he's right: the ifs don't matter. We have each other now.

After a while, he presses a kiss, more gentle than the others, to the side of my neck and lifts his head. Even his healthy eye is bloodshot.

“Did you read the last bit?” he asks, voice thick with tears.

“The…?”

“There’s a postscript.”

> _P.S. Arabel cleaned out your desk the other day. I couldn't bear to do it myself. But she found a necklace of yours, the little crescent moon you liked so much. I don't know why you left it here, but I'm keeping it with me now. I'll cling to every piece of you I can find. Let me dream of you until it's real. Let me dream of you until I can't dream any longer. I fell so hard, so quickly… let me dream until I find you again._

He laughs shakily and lets his fingertips skate over the silver pendant around my neck. It's the same one I saw him weep over in a vision in the library, the same one that led me to him when he was still a fugitive. It must be the same one I wore back then too.

“It worked,” he whispers.

It worked. By all natural laws, it shouldn’t have. Love is no miracle: if it was, no one would ever die. But for us, it worked.

If I believe in anything, I believe that the pieces of me will find the pieces of him wherever we can, as trinkets woven with memories no longer remembered or the light of the moon on ocean waves. We will find each other in laughter and passion and tears. We will see scraps of each other in an arrangement of words in a book, or notes in a song, and we’ll know. We’ll dream until we find each other again.

And sometimes, it will work.


End file.
